1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to bandwidth management of communication sessions, and, in particular, to a system and method for aggressive bandwidth management in audio and/or video conferencing systems, webinars, web conferences, virtual reality session, and the like
2. Description of Related Art
In today's market, the use of video services, such as video conferencing, is experiencing a dramatic increase. Since video services require a significantly larger amount of bandwidth compared to audio services, this has caused increased pressure on existing communication systems to provide the necessary bandwidth for video communications. Because of the higher bandwidth requirements of video, users are constantly looking for products and services that can provide the required video services efficiently and within the limits of available lower-cost bandwidth. One way to do this is to provide solutions that reduce and/or optimize the bandwidth used by video services.
Some video conferencing users actively observe at all times, and participate whenever needed. Other users are less active participants, and may devote less than full attention during the video conference, e.g., by multitasking during the video conference, while participating more actively in the video conference only for a few topics. Other video conferencing users may be absent participants who may walk away entirely from their telecom endpoints during some portion of the video conference. Conventional systems will devote sufficient resources (e.g., bandwidth, CPU or memory utilization, etc.) to service active users, which would be more resources than are needed to service less active or absent participants, thereby causing a waste of the system resources.
In the background art, a lack of sound from a user's telecom endpoint may allow a video conferencing system to auto-mute the telecom endpoint and thereby conserve upstream bandwidth. Similar approaches can also be used to video-mute an absent user's endpoint, again for reducing upstream bandwidth. Some systems may mute an endpoint if a call is auto-answered (e.g., answered by an answering machine), for reasons of privacy, for reducing annoyance to nearby persons, and/or conserving upstream bandwidth. Some systems may mute an endpoint in order to reduce noise originating from connected but unused or underutilized telecom endpoints, but do not have sophisticated methods of detecting when a telecom endpoint is unused or underutilized.
Therefore, a need exists to provide improved methods of detecting when a telecom endpoint is unused or underutilized, in order to improve upstream bandwidth conservation, and ultimately improved customer satisfaction through greater resource availability.